The International Garden Festival has announced the five designs selected to be displayed at the 17th edition of the Festival at Les Jardins de Métis / Redford Gardens in Grand-Métis, Canada. The five winning gardens, selected from 203 projects submitted from 31 countries, will join previous years’ winners in the larger display of interactive spaces created by more than 85 landscape architects, architects, and designers.
The five winning gardens for the 2016 edition of The International Garden Festival are:
Le caveau / Christian Poules, architect and landscape architect, Basel, Switzerland
The growing plane is shrouded in the intimacy of Le caveau (the cave) - a four-sided room of stacked gabions full of stones. Stone that allows light to filter through its gaps and washes the room with its shadows. It is a room of reflection. It is a room for dreamers. Just as the plane levitates before us, we are held in the balance of the stone and life itself. The personification of our own imaginations suspended in time. The primitive plane symbolizes a beginning - the seed and the soil, the tilted horizon between earth and sky.
Carbone / Coache Lacaille Paysagistes [Maxime Coache, landscape architect, Victor Lacaille, landscape designer, Luc Dallanora, landscape architect], Nantes, France
This installation evokes the cycle of production as a parallel to the carbon cycle. The garden landscaped or the landscape gardened. Regenerating the forest and sowing where we have harvested brings nature back to life. Transmit the love of landscape to those who will outlive us.
A sculpted tree trunk, partially cut into pieces helps to illustrate the primary material used to build furniture. A stump and its roots, a tree trunk cut into parts and five modules made of timber, some lightly burned on the surface. A young tree grows where the tree might have grown tall had the tree not fallen.
Cyclops / Craig Chapple, architect, Phoenix, Arizona, United States
Cyclops is a singular object on the landscape as well as a singular frame of the landscape. Made up of 258 8-meter long timber and 1 x 6 boards, they are held in a concentric ring by 2 steel rings suspended from the surrounding trees by stainless steel cables.
Cyclops is held in a tenuous balance with the environment that provides for it. The central 1.5 m opening at the bottom of the cone is a highly-charged occupiable space for the viewer to both view the canopy in a new way but also truly feel the focus of the suspended weight as the physical latent force in the trees themselves. The viewer finds himself playing the central role of the work in rediscovering their relationship to the energy in their environment.
La maison de Jacques / Romy Brosseau, Rosemarie Faille-Faubert, Émilie Gagné-Loranger, intern architects, Quebec City (Québec) Canada
La maison de Jacques (or Jack’s House from the children’s fable Jack and the Beanstalk) is different from the one we know. You might think you have just stepped out of a children’s story. The house is a green grove that is enveloped in bloom. You enter by walking on stepping stones that traverse a ground-cover made of small. Once inside, you wander between the rows of beans of tightly winding their way up a light wooden structure. The walls divide the space into a series of small hidden gardens, singular in their proportions. These cocoons are ideal hiding places for a game of hide-and-seek. One remains a secret, inaccessible...
La maison de Jacques is magical. It will be built over several weeks, starting with the seedlings in May that will grow to be more than 3 metres in height in a short time. Their clumps of red flowers will be in bloom by the end of July and then the beans will form to bring a taste of goodness to everyone.
TiiLT / SRCW [Sean Radford, architect, Chris Wiebe, designer], Winnipeg (Manitoba) Canada
Finding roots in the formal geometries of the labyrinth and the many informal camping traditions in the Canadian landscape, TiiLT is a transformable and inhabitable place for visitors to act, or to idle, however they may be inclined.
Each structure may be flipped between two orientations, responding to the position of the sun, offering alternating views and shifting pathways through the site. The toggling movement conjures a school of fish, or a flock of birds, flitting in opposite directions yet connected as a whole. The straw-like lightness of the structures and brilliant yellow skin recall a field of floral blooms, contrasting the surrounding green landscape and blue sky.
The gardens will be on display from June 23 to October 2, 2016.
News and project descriptions via The International Garden Festival.
